At the age of forty-five, former GI Jeff Williams wakes up in the ICU in the wake of a serious accident. Having stared death in the face, he must now confront a pivotal moment in his life; an epiphany forces him to realize that his past way of being must be discarded and a new future must be forged. Inspired by author Edmond E. Frank’s own life, THE SOUL OF AN EAGLE charts the narrative of one man’s spiritual resurrection, a quest wherein he attempts to harness the Spiritual Laws in pursuit of establishing a truer life and self. To help him navigate this difficult journey is his counsel, Big D – the Angel of Death, the specter always watching over his shoulder and pointing him in the right direction.
Key life events are often a harbinger of change. For Jeff, his brush with death forced him to acknowledge that he had been living a lie, or at least had not been true to himself. It was at this low point that Jeff came to understand that not only had he narrowly escaped physical death – this was also the death-knell for his twenty-five-year marriage to his Korean wife, Meg. The wounding impact of a mere seven words from Meg reverberates throughout the book: ‘Why can’t you wipe your butt better?’ Jeff has clearly lived with this level of contempt, disdain, and disrespect for many years and has become inured to it. It later becomes clear that such toxic, damaging relationships with women stem from the cold and controlling behavior of his mother. Enter Big D, whose intermittent jouska with Jeff through the course of his rebirth illuminates the way forward. The reader witnesses Jeff wrangling with each stage of the process on his path to ‘redneck spirituality’, commencing with its most important Law: the Law of the Creator, which underpins every other tenet of the Spiritual Laws.
Jeff’s odyssey is wrought through the book’s interesting structure: the diary-like chronological account of his experiences – from the time of his hospitalization in 1992 – is alternated with his present-day situation, which finds him in a tricky situation at Comb Ridge, Utah. The two time-frames ultimately meet as the story reaches its denouement. Is this where Jeff’s story is destined to end? Or is this just the start of the next stage of his life? Anticipation of the answers to these questions help drive the momentum of the narrative.
A novel-cum-memoir-cum-self-help manual, THE SOUL OF AN EAGLE will appeal to those who seek inspiration and are open to embracing the power of spiritual realization. The more cynical reader may not be so easily converted.
~Amanda Ellison for IndieReader